Nation Page 11

  “What are you looking for?” asked Mau.

  “Omens, portents, messages from the gods, demon boy.”

  Mau looked up. Only the star of Fire was visible this close to dawn. “Have you seen any?” he asked.

  “No, but it would be terrible to miss one, wouldn’t it?” said Ataba.

  “Was there one before the wave? Was there a message in the sky?”

  “Quite possibly, but we were not good enough to know what it meant.”

  “We would have, if they had shouted a warning. We’d have understood that! Why didn’t they just shout?”

  “HELLO!” It was so loud it seemed to echo off the mountain.

  Mau felt the shock down his body, and then his brain cut in with: It came from the sea! There’s a light on the water! And it’s not Raiders, because they wouldn’t shout “Hello!”

  But the old man was on his feet, mouth open in a horrible grin. “Aha, you believed!” he crowed, waving a skinny finger at Mau. “Oh yes you did, just for a second! And you were fearful, and rightly so!”

  “There’s a canoe with a lobster-claw sail!” said Mau, trying to ignore him. “They’re coming around the point! Look, they even have a torch burning!”

  But Ataba hadn’t finished gloating. “For just one moment you—”

  “I don’t care! Come on! There’s more people!”

  The canoe was coming through the new gap in the reef. Mau made out two figures, still shadowy against the rising light, lowering the sail. The tide was right and the people knew what they were doing, because the craft slid easily into the lagoon, as if it were steering itself.

  It nudged the beach gently, and a young man jumped down and ran toward Mau.

  “Are there women here?” he said. “Please, my brother’s wife is going to have a baby!”

  “We have one woman, but she is sick.”

  “Can she sing the calling song?”

  Mau glanced at the Unknown Woman. He’d never heard a word from her, and he wasn’t at all sure she was right in the head.

  “I doubt it,” he said.

  The man sagged. He was young, only a few years older than Mau. “We were taking Cahle to the Women’s Place on the Overshoal Islands when the wave hit,” he said. “They’re gone. So many places have…gone. And we saw your smoke. Please, where is your chief?”

  “I’m here,” said Mau firmly. “Take her up to the Women’s Place. Ataba here will show you the way.” The old priest sniffed and scowled but didn’t argue.

  The young man stared at Mau. “You are the chief? But you are just a boy!”

  “Not just. Not even. Not only. Who knows?” said Mau. “The wave came. These are new days. Who knows what we are? We survived, that’s all.” He paused, and thought: And we become what we have to be…. “There is a girl who can help you. I will send her up to the Women’s Place,” he said.

  “Thank you. It is going to be very soon! My name is Pilu. My brother is Milo.”

  “You mean the ghost girl?” hissed Ataba in Mau’s ear as the boy ran back down the beach. “That’s not right! She doesn’t know the birthing customs!”

  “Do you?” asked Mau. “Can you help her?”

  Ataba backed away as if he’d been burned. “Me? No!”

  “Then stay out of the way. Look, she will know what to do. Women always do,” said Mau, trying to sound certain. Besides, it was true, wasn’t it? Boys had to live on the island and build a canoe before they were officially men, but with girls it just happened somehow. Then they magically knew things, like how to hold babies the right way up and how to go “Ooozeewididwidwden?” without the baby screaming until its little face went blue. “Besides, she’s not a man, she can talk, and she’s alive,” he finished.

  “Well, I suppose, in the circumstances—” Ataba conceded.

  Mau turned to look at the two brothers, who were helping a very pregnant woman onto the beach. “Show them the way. I’ll be quick!” he said, and ran off.

  Are trousermen women the same as real women? he wondered as he ran. She got very angry when I drew that picture! Do they ever take their clothes off? Oh, please, please don’t let her say no!

  And his next thought, as he ran into the low forest, which was alive with birdsong, was: Who did I just say “please” to?

  Daphne lay in the dark with a towel around her head. It was stuffy in the wreck, and damp and smelly. But you had to maintain standards. Her grandmother had been very keen on Maintaining Standards. She positively looked for Standards to Maintain, and if she didn’t find any, she made some up and Maintained them.

  Sleeping in the captain’s hammock probably wasn’t Maintaining Standards, but her mattress was damp and sticky with salt. Everything was damp. Nothing dried properly down here, and of course she couldn’t hang her washing out up above the beach, in case men saw her underthings, which would definitely not Maintain any Standards at all.

  The hammock swung gently back and forth. It was very uncomfortable, but it had the big advantage that the little red crabs couldn’t get onto it. She knew they would be scuttling around on the floor again, getting into everything, but at least with the towel around her head she couldn’t hear the little scrittle scrittle noise they made as they ran about.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t cut out what, back home, would have been called the dawn chorus, but that just wasn’t the right word for the explosion of noise that was happening outside. It was like a war with whistles; everything with a feather on it went crazy. And the wretched pantaloon birds’ suppers also came up as the sun rose (she could hear them pattering on the deck above her) and, by the sound of it, Captain Roberts’s parrot still hadn’t run out of swear words. Some of them were foreign, which made it worse. But she could still tell it was swearing. She just could.

  Sleep came and went in patches, but in every fuzzy half-awake dream the boy moved.

  When she had been younger, she’d been given a book full of patriotic pictures about the Empire, and one had stuck in her mind because it was called “the Nobbly Savage.” She hadn’t understood why the boy with the spear and the skin as golden-brown as freshly poured bronze was called nobbly, since he looked as smooth as cream, and it wasn’t until years later that she realized how you were supposed to pronounce the word that was spelled noble.

  Mau looked like him, but the boy in the picture had been smiling, and Mau didn’t smile, and he moved like something trapped in a cage. She was sorry now that she had shot at him.

  Her memory swirled in the ripples of her sleepy brain. She remembered him on that first dreadful day. He’d walked around as though he were some kind of engine, and hadn’t heard her, hadn’t even seen her. He was carrying the bodies of dead people and his eyes were looking into another world. Sometimes she thought they still were. He seemed angry all the time, in the way that Grandmother got angry when she found out that Standards were not being Maintained.

  She groaned as there was a pattering overhead. Another pantaloon bird had thrown up the remains of last night’s dinner, vomiting little bones all over the deck. Time to get up.

  She unwrapped the towel from her head and sat up.

  Mau was standing by the bed, watching her. How’d he gotten in? How had he walked across the deck without treading on a crab? She would have heard! Why was he staring like that? Why, oh why, hadn’t she worn her one clean nightshirt?

  “How dare you walk in like—?” she began.

  “Woman baby,” said Mau urgently. He had only just arrived, and had been wondering how to wake her up.

  “What?”

  “Baby come!”

  “What’s wrong with it now? Did you get the milk?”

  Mau tried to think. What was that word she used to mean one thing after another thing. Oh yes…

  “Woman and baby!” he said.

  “What about them?”

  He could see that it hadn’t worked, either. Then an idea struck him. He held his arms out, as if there was a huge pumpkin in front of him. “Woman, baby.�
�� Then he folded his arms and rocked them.

  The ghost girl stared at him. If Imo made the world, Mau thought, why can’t we understand one another?

  This is impossible, Daphne thought. Is it about that poor woman? But she can’t possibly be having another baby! Or maybe he means…?

  “People come island?”

  “Yes!” shouted Mau, relieved.

  “A woman?”

  Mau did the pumpkin act again. “Yes!”

  “And she’s…enceinte?” It meant pregnant, but her grandmother said a lady would never use that word in polite company. Mau, who was certainly not what her grandmother would have thought of as polite company, looked blank.

  Blushing furiously, Daphne did her own version of the pumpkin act. “Uh, like this?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well, that’s nice,” said Daphne, as steel terror rose up inside her. “I hope she’s very happy. Now I’ve really got to do some washing—”

  “Women’s Place, you come,” said Mau.

  Daphne shook her head. “No! It’s nothing to do with me, is it? I don’t know anything about…babies being born!” Which wasn’t true, but she wished, oh how she wished it was true. If she closed her eyes, she could still hear…no! “I’m not coming! You can’t make me,” she said, pulling back.

  He gripped her arm, softly but firmly. “Baby. You come,” he said, his voice as firm as the grip.

  “You didn’t see the little coffin next to the big one!” she screamed. “You don’t know what that was like!”

  And it came to her like a blow. He does. I watched him bury all those people in the sea. He knows. How can I refuse?

  She let herself relax. She wasn’t nine years old anymore, sitting at the top of the stairs cowering and listening and getting out of the way quickly when the doctor came thundering up the stairs with his big black bag. And the worst of it all, if you could find the highest wave in a sea of worsts, was that she hadn’t been able to do anything.

  “Poor Captain Roberts had a medical book in his sea chest,” she said, “and a box of drugs and things. I’ll go and fetch them, shall I?”

  The brothers were waiting at the narrow entrance to the Women’s Place when Mau arrived with Daphne, and that was when the world changed yet again. It changed when the older brother said: “This is a trouserman girl!”

  “Yes, the wave brought her,” said Mau.

  And then the younger brother said something in what sounded like trouserman, and Daphne almost dropped the box she was carrying, and spoke quickly to him in the same language.

  “What did you say to her?” said Mau. “What did she say to you?”

  “I said: ‘Hello, lovely lady’—” the young man began.

  “Who cares what anyone said to anybody? She’s a woman! Now get me in there!”

  That was Cahle, the mother-to-be, hanging heavily between her husband and her brother-in-law, and very big and very angry.

  The brothers looked up at the rocky entrance. “Er…” the husband began.

  Ah, fear of the safety of the wingo, thought Mau. “I’ll help her in,” he said quickly. “I’m not a man. I can go in.”

  “Do you really have no soul?” said the younger brother. “Only, the priest said you had no soul….”

  Mau looked around for Ataba, but the old man suddenly had business elsewhere.

  “I don’t know. What does one look like?” he said. He put his arm around the woman and, with a worried Daphne supporting her on the other side, they headed into the Place.

  “Sing the baby a good song to welcome it, pretty lady,” shouted Pilu after them. Then he said to his brother: “Do you trust him?”

  “He is young and he has no tattoos,” said Milo.

  “But he seems…older. And maybe he has no soul!”

  “Well, I’ve never seen mine. Have you seen yours? And the trouserman girl in white…you remember the praying ladies in white we saw that time when we helped carry Bos’n Higgs to that big house for makin’ people better and how they sewed up the gash in his leg so neat? She is like them, you bet. She knows all about medicine, for sure.”

  CHAPTER 6

  A Star Is Born

  DAPHNE FLIPPED DESPAIRINGLY THROUGH the medical book, which had been published in 1770, before people had learned to spell properly. It was stained and falling apart like a very crumbly pack of cards. It had crude woodcut diagrams like “How to Saw a Leg Off”—aargh aargh aargh—and “How to Set Bones”—yuck—and cutaway diagrams of—oh, no—aargh aargh aargh!

  The book’s title was The Mariners’ Medical Companion, and it was for people whose medicine cabinet was a bottle of castor oil, whose operating table was a bench sliding up and down a heaving deck, and whose tools were a saw, a hammer, and a bucket of hot tar and a piece of string. There wasn’t much in there about childbirth, and what there was—she turned the page—aargh! An illustration that she really did not want to see; it was for those times when things were so bad that not even a surgeon could make them worse.

  The mother-to-be was lying on a woven bed in one of the huts, groaning, and Daphne wasn’t sure if this was good or bad. But she was absolutely certain that Mau shouldn’t be watching her, boy or not. This was called the Women’s Place, and it didn’t get more womanly than it was about to be.

  She pointed at the door. Mau looked astonished.

  “Shoo, out! I mean it! I don’t care if you’re human or a ghost or a demon or whatever you are, but you aren’t a female one! There’s got to be some rules! That’s it, out! And no listening at the keyh—piece of string,” she added, pulling the grass curtains that did, very badly, the job of a door.

  She felt better for all that. A good shouting at somebody always makes you feel better and in control, especially if you aren’t. Then she sat down by the mat again.

  The woman grabbed her arm and rattled out a question.

  “Er…I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Daphne said, and the woman spoke again, gripping her arm so tightly that the skin went white.

  “…I don’t know what to do…. Oh, no, don’t let it go wrong….”

  The little coffin, so small on top of the big one. She’d never forget it. She’d wanted to look inside, but they wouldn’t let her, and they wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t let her explain. Men came around to sit with her father, so the house was full of people all night, and there wasn’t a new baby brother or sister, and that wasn’t all that had gone from her world. So she’d sat there on the top landing all night, next to the coffins, wanting to do something and not daring to do it, and feeling so sorry for the poor little dead boy crying, all alone.

  The woman arched her body and yelled something. Hold on, there had to be a song, yes? That’s what they said. A song to welcome the baby. What song? How would she know?

  Maybe it wouldn’t matter what song it was, so long as it was a welcoming song, a good song for the child’s spirit to hear, so that it would hurry up to be born. Yes, that sounded like a good idea, but why did she have, just for the moment, the certainty that it was supposed to be a good one? And here came a song, so old in her mind that she could not remember not knowing it, a song her mother sang to her, in the days when she still had a mother.

  She leaned down, cleared her throat carefully, and sang: “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are—”

  The woman stared at her, seemed puzzled for a moment, and then relaxed.

  “Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky—” sang Daphne’s lips, while her brain thought: She’s got a lot of milk, she could easily feed two babies, so I should get them to bring the other woman and her child up here. And this thought was followed by: Did I just think that? But I don’t even know how babies are born! I hope there’s no blood; I hate the sight of blood—

  “When the blazing sun is gone,

  When he nothing shines upon,

  Then you show your little light,

  Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.

  Then the t
raveler in the dark

  Thanks you for your tiny spark…”

  And now something was happening. She carefully pulled aside the woman’s skirt. Oh, so that’s how. My goodness. I don’t know what to do! And here came another thought, as if it had been lying in wait: This is what you do….

  The men were waiting outside the gateway to the Place, feeling unnecessary and surplus to requirements, which is exactly the appropriate feeling in the circumstances.

  At least Mau had time to learn their names. Milota-dan (big, the oldest, who was head and shoulders taller than anyone Mau had ever seen) and Pilu-si (small, always rushing, and hardly ever not smiling).

  He found out that Pilu did all the talking: “We went on a trouserman boat for six months once, all the way to a big place called Port Mercia. Good fun! We saw huge houses made of stone, and they had meat called beef and we learned trousermen talk, and when they dropped us off back home they gave us big steel knives and needles and a three-legged pot—”

  “Hush,” said Milo, raising a hand. “She’s singing! In trouserman! Come on, Pilu, you’re the best at this!”

  Mau leaned forward. “What’s it about?”

  “Look, our job was to pull on ropes and carry things,” Pilu complained. “Not work out songs!”

  “But you said you could speak trouserman!” Mau insisted.

  “To get by, yes! But this is very complicated! Um…”

  “This is important, brother!” said Milo. “This is the first thing my son will hear!”

  “Quiet! I think it’s about…stars,” said Pilu, bent in concentration.

  “Stars is good,” said Milo, looking around approvingly.

  “She’s saying the baby—”

  “He,” said Milo firmly. “He will be a boy.”

  “Er, yes, certainly. He will be, yes, like a star, guiding people in the dark. He will twinkle, but I don’t know what that means….”